Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a rapid and direct molecular method for profiling microbial populations and communities using vibrational spectromicroscopy and imaging.
Related Art
Microbes always live in communities. They make up the foundation of the biosphere and sustain all the life forms on earth. They play a key role in the cycling of elements and nutrients, carry out processes that are beneficial to the environment and to human society, yet they remain largely unexplored. Knowledge of the microbial communities, such as the predominant species, their role and interaction, their spatial distribution and variation with time or in response to a natural or man-made disturbance, is essential to understand the planet scale effect of any ecological phenomenon. Currently, scientists in environmental microbiology use amplicon analyses of different marker genes to explore microbiome structures. A commonly used is marker gene 16S rRNA that has already been used for this purpose in thousands of studies. Apart from 16S rRNA gene profiles, there are other methods such as comparative metagenomics and transcriptomics, which mainly focus on functional changes of microbial communities, as well as lipidomics, which permits relative quantification and identification of cellular lipids. However, the aforementioned methods and currently applied methods require complete destruction of the sample in order to extract specific analytes for further analyses. Thus, there is a need for methods which provide the same levels of quantification and identification and community profiling, yet do not destroy samples.